Was Rory McIlroy *destined* to win the Masters? Here’s how he sees it

FLOURTOWN, Pa. — Rory McIlroy set a PGA Tour record Wednesday morning. He played nine holes of pro-am golf — the Masters champ and three better-than-decent amateurs — in less than two hours. The Tour’s media people thought he was on the 6th hole when he was actually on the 9th. It can be done, people. It can be done. Walk to your ball with a club and a plan.

The McIlroy foursome had a few things going for it. For starters, McIlroy plays no-fuss Irish golf. His group was the first off. The three ams played ready golf. And the course, the Philadelphia Cricket Club’s Tillinghast course, lovely and sane, is 7,100 yards, all stretched out. It was meant for walking, with no stretches of turnpikes between greens and tees. (One wee wooden bridge.) You stumble off the 8th green and onto the 9th tee, as the course is routed for this Truist Championship. The thing you see all over Scotland, greens and tees living in harmony, side by side.

McIlroy, the sixth and newest member of the Career Grand Slam club, was chitchatting with friends and admirers as he walked the springy spring-in-Philadelphia fairways with his familiar bouncy gait on Wednesday morn. He actually ran 50 or so uphill yards from the 7th green to the 8th tee, took a look at the hole for the first time ever and said, “Whew, long par-3!”

Uphill, into a hook wind, 240 yards. He smoked a towering, drawing 4-iron that was hole-high and perfect. Local golfers who know the course well (your correspondent has played it hundreds of times over the past nearly 40 years), have been eager to see how it would hold up when played by many of the best players in the world. On Wednesday morning, we got our answer. The Masters champ just made the most demanding hole on the course look easy. McIlroy does that. He makes golf look easy.

He did not, famously, make winning the Masters last month look easy, what with his double on the 1st and another on 13 and winning, in his 17th attempt to win a green coat, on the first playoff hole over Justin Rose.

Our sister publication, GOLF Magazine, has Rory on the next cover. For the piece, I asked various people if they thought McIlroy would win the Masters someday. Not hoped — thought. There was a range of answers. One person told me McIlroy was “destined” to win it. About that same time, I stumbled on to an amazing Bob Dylan quote in which the Bard of Hibbing, Minn., defines destiny, responding to a question from Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes. Knowing that McIlroy would be coming into the press tent for a short press conference after his nine holes of pro-am fun, I wrote out the quote (green felt marker, heavy paper), with the idea that maybe I could get him the sheet and ask him to read it and respond to it. It was likely a fantasy — handing a sheet of paper like that is outside the cultural norm of these things — but fantasy is an important part of life. Right?

I asked McIlroy if he always had faith, that he would someday win the Masters.

“I always had hope,” McIlroy said. ”I wasn’t going to show up at Augusta and feel like I couldn’t win. The week that I feel like that, I’ll go up there for the Champions Dinner and swan around in my green jacket. But I won’t be playing.

“Yeah, I always had hope. I always felt like I had the game. As everyone saw on that back nine on Sunday, it was about getting over — I don’t know what the right phrase is — but defeating my own mind was sort of the big thing for me.”

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It would be interesting, to hear Dylan and McIlroy compare notes on fate and destiny and effort and hope. (Years ago, at MountainGate in Los Angeles, I played with a tiny teaching pro, Suzy, a few years beyond middle age, who said she was Bob Dylan’s golf instructor, and I had every reason to believe her.) This is what Dylan said to Ed Bradley about destiny: 

“It’s a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. That the picture you have of yourself, in your own mind, will come true. It’s the kind of thing you have to keep to your own self. Because it’s a fragile feeling. And if you put it out there, then somebody will kill it. It’s best to keep that all inside.”

Those are amazing sentences, really. But these matters are not, of course, one-size-fits-all. McIlroy said he imagined playing the shots he would need to win the Masters. He didn’t imagine the Butler Cabin ceremony or any of that.

“The worst I felt, on Sunday at Augusta, was probably when I made the birdie putt on 10 to go 4 ahead because I’m like, ‘Oh, I really can’t mess this up now.’”

That was a pressure-cooker, that Sunday afternoon. That’s what made it so wonderful and exhilarating. Justin Thomas said on Wednesday that he watched the finale, “glued to the TV.” Xander Schauffele said about the same.

This week, the Truist at Philadelphia Cricket, will not be that. This week the rich will get richer, and a CBS audience will get to see a lovely old classic course manhandled by modern equipment and ferocious speed. The winner is going to get a silver cricket bat, and $3.6 million. You can kind of guess what Dylan would tell the 72 players in this event:

Manifest that.

McIlroy played some cricket as a kid in Northern Ireland. He’s played a lot of golf in these old-timey courses. He’s not going to have to defeat his mind to win here. All he has to do is shoot a lower score than the other 71 guys.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com